Naming Rights

Time to start calling our climate enemies what they are.

Happy is upset because the ball is “unwinding” climate legislation.

Not long ago, I joined the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub. It’s nifty—bit of a trek to get somewhere you’re not required to be, but worth it. Popping with interesting people who want to connect—professionals who are all on Team Climate. You could be an engineer, or a go-to-market strategist, or, like me, a fucking writer, of all marginally useful things to be, and as long as you wear a passion for the climate fight on your sleeve, you’ll fit right in. And the free coffee is actually decent, which is far from a given.

There’s a real sense of community at the hub. So I make the commute when I can. And during said commute, all too often I forget not to start scrolling. Soon I’m reading about how the Big Beautiful Bill is going to unwind all the climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s not a done deal yet, which is another way of saying that Republicans are fighting with themselves about whether to burn it all down or blow it all up.

Unwind doesn’t seem like a contranym, does it? A word that can mean either its literal definition or literally its opposite (like how literally also means figuratively now—sigh). But if I can be trying to unwind (chill) at the end of a long day only to semi-accidentally find myself reading about how the bastards are getting set to unwind (destroy) all aspects of federal climate policy, then that is contra and that is nym.

And it’s like, how dare they get to use a word that means relax to describe their horrific, destructive, and—even according to their own stated priorities—enormously counterproductive bullshit? How dare they take "unwind" from us regular-type folks and pervert it like that?

If that seems like an aside that’s entirely beside the point, it’s actually more or less my whole point:

All of us on Team Climate need to stop doing the same thing to ourselves. Which is not to say we need to fixate on finding the perfectly suitable label for ourselves. Rather, what we need is better names for our enemies.

Since the orange king’s inauguration, much has been written about democracy at risk, backsliding into authoritarianism, the rise of autocracy, and how it’s time to start saying the f-word.

All important things for the mind to chew on. But authoritarianism, fascism, autocracy, plutocracy … these are stuffy, inert terms describing institutional decline.

We need words we can grab onto and wield like a club.

We need to name our enemies.

Name them like we know who they are and call them out, of course—but more specifically, I’m talking about nicknaming them.

Similar to my post a while back about giving Elon Musk a proper nickname,* finding the right collective names for these assholes is a challenge in large part because the scope of their sins is so large: bowing to the orange king every chance they get; undermining science and universities and the press for reasons that may not plainly state climate but sure as shit include it; and so on and so forth.

*Y’all preferred Muskerfucker by a slim margin, which is fitting b/c that was the one that just fell out onto the proverbial page. My current favorite is one that popped into view only more recentlly: Nylon Musk. Nylon being what you get when you smash neoNazi + Elon together. Now, technically speaking, the proper portmanteau of NeoNazi and Elon is Neelon, but I’m not about to besmirch the name of my beloved Kevin Neelon, who just wants to go home—his bags are packed—and regardless, Nylon Musk is both fun to say and also something it’s impossible to imagine him not hating.

I wish I had a master list of choice options to present you. I did make a list, but it had several garbage ideas on it which I won’t subject you to. Here’s the revised list:

1. Big oil’s little bitch (Bolb)

If you’re a bolb, you might work for a fossil fuel company or you might be a politician; you might be a billionaire who has knelt down and opened his throat for the oil prince that assassinated the journalist who worked for you; you might be a lawyer or you might be one of the roughly 1,500 former federal workers who are now fossil fuel lobbyists. But whoever you are, what makes you a big oil’s little bitch is that you’re doing far more than ignoring the climate crisis. You are actively undermining efforts to fight it.

So congrats, Bolb. Now go wash up—you’ve got crude in your hair.